


More Blood Than Water

by PhoenixFalls



Series: Just As They Wished It To Be [10]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Author knows fanon better than canon, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Grieving, Natasha Feels, Natasha Is Not A Robot, Post-Canon, Tony Feels, Tony Stark can be serious!, Tony Stark does the reading, Tony Stark reads SFF
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-23
Updated: 2013-02-23
Packaged: 2017-12-03 09:25:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/696778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PhoenixFalls/pseuds/PhoenixFalls
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Late one night Tony stumbles on an unexpected sight in his tower's emergency stairwell: the Black Widow, sobbing.</p><p>Written for <a href="http://avengerkink.livejournal.com/10266.html?thread=21855514#t21855514">this prompt</a> on Avenger Kink.</p>
            </blockquote>





	More Blood Than Water

The Black Widow was sobbing in Tony’s emergency stairwell.

Tony rubbed his eyes, checking to see if it was a figment of his imagination. It was something like 3am, and he had been up for nearly forty hours doing some emergency trouble-shooting for S.I. R&D, so that was a possibility. But she was still there, and still sobbing silently, when he reopened his eyes.

She hadn’t heard him enter the stairwell, and Tony decided it would really be best that she never know he stumbled on her moment of weakness, so he started slowly backing back out. Unfortunately, in his exhaustion his foot slipped and scuffed the floor.

Immediately Widow was whirling to her feet in a defensive crouch. She was perhaps even more threatening here, barefoot and wearing cotton pajamas, than she was in the field when she was dressed in her jumpsuit and had her widow’s sting in hand. She spotted Tony, and then in the blink of an eye she was in Tony’s face, pushing him back against the doorjamb, her forearm at his throat.

“This. Never. Happened.” Her voice was dead even, her eyes clear and dry, and if it weren’t for the tracks visible on her cheeks Tony would have thought he had imagined her tears.

Tony raised his hands to signal his assent. “Yeah, no, I just, I was just on my way to bed, should’ve taken the elevator, tried to tell Pep I get enough exercise in the suit, don’t need ‘incidental exercise’ to burn off the scotch and take-out—“

Widow pressed him harder against the frame, then dropped her arm and turned away. “Shut up, Stark. Get out.”

“Yeah, I’ll just, I’ll be on my way, I’m so tired I’m sure I won’t even remember this in the morning. . .”

And Tony would have gone, would have left Widow to pull herself together in private, but just as the door closed between them he saw her crumple, looking even more broken than before.

He took a deep breath for courage, because he knew he was probably going to fuck this up, then pushed the door open again and took three quick strides back to Widow’s side, sinking down next to her. He kept his hands in his lap and his eyes focused on the far wall, but pressed gently into her side.

She stiffened at the first touch, and he thought for a moment that she was going to either run or attack him, but then a shudder ran the full length of her body and she started crying again.

They sat there together for long minutes, the only the only sounds the brush of cloth as her shoulders hitched up and down against his and his deep even breaths. She was cold, and he wondered how long she had been huddled here in the only part of the tower without climate control. Finally her tears slowed, then stopped altogether. Tony snuck a peek out of the corner of his eye and saw her wiping her face in that way women learned sometime in their teen years, quick sweeps of her fingers across her cheeks, taking care not to further ruin the remains of her makeup.

She synchronized her breathing to his.

Tony turned his attention back to the wall. His voice was quiet, barely echoed down the stairs at all. “I wasn’t the only prisoner of the Ten Rings.”

He could feel Widow’s attention sharpen, her posture go from defensive and closed-off to alert, receptive.

“The doctor that operated on my heart wasn’t one of them. He was a brilliant surgeon, on the cutting edge of biomechatronics. The Ten Rings abducted him from an Afghanistan town called Gulmira.” Tony knew Widow recognized that name, but she stayed still and silent. “He pushed and prodded me, never letting me forget what my weapons had done and never letting me give up on myself despite that. He stopped me, as much as he was able, from letting my mouth write checks my body would have to cash.”

“He helped me build the Mark I.”

Tony was glad for the fluorescent lights; the cold seeping through his pants from the metal stairs was chilling him in more ways than one, and if he had been somewhere shadowy he knew he’d never be able to say this next bit.

“The plan was for me to go out in front; the Mark I was crude but it was mostly bullet proof. He was supposed to watch my back with the first gun we could steal while I took the heavy fire. But they got suspicious, tripped the explosives on the door before we could get the suit online.”

One deep breath, and Tony didn’t bother to blink away the tears that formed in his eyes. “I was trapped in a glorified tin can while the best man I’ve ever known gave up his life for mine.”

“That was when I became an Avenger, long before Loki set his sights on Earth. And after I blew the compound sky-high, nearly blowing myself up in the process, I stumbled out of the wreckage of the suit, took maybe four steps, then fell to my knees and bawled.”

“I really couldn’t spare the fluids — it took Rhodey a day and a half to find me in the desert, even with the fiery ‘Tony Stark was here’ I painted on the remains of the cave where I was held. I was tasting that mixture of blood, sand, and snot the entire time, and was out of my mind with heat stroke by the end of it. It didn’t do my broken ribs any favors either. But that didn’t matter. A few tears were the absolute least that I owed the man.”

Widow remained silent, and Tony began to wonder if he should leave her, now that the worst paroxysm of her grief seemed to have passed. Unable to sit still any longer, his hand twitched towards the reactor; Widow stirred at his side and he stilled it.

“When Clint decided to bring me in, the first person he brought me to was Phil. And Phil trusted me on Clint’s bare word. It was. . . breathtaking, the amount of trust he had in Clint. I thought he was a fool, gullible as any mark, and I knew that even though I intended to be true, in the end I would betray them both. That gullibility was a weakness that someone would be able to exploit, and I am a survivor.”

She paused, and Tony chanced a quick look. Her face was its usual beautiful mask, but her eyes were dark and he thought there was a slightly bitter pinch at the corners of her mouth.

“But time passed, and he never set me a test that I could not pass, and no matter how blown the mission was Phil always found a way to bring me home.”

She took a deep breath, and the the bitter pinch turned into a full snarl. “And while he was dying I was running from the Hulk like a fucking civilian. And then instead of avenging him I stood by and watched as the creature that killed him was taken home by his sorrowful but still loving older brother. These tears. . . they are little more than self-indulgence. I don’t have the right to grieve for his sacrifice.”

Tony huffed a breath and dug his shoulder into hers. “All grief is self-indulgence. I wasn’t crying because a man died who didn’t deserve to die; I was crying because the man I admired and, quite frankly, loved didn’t get to see that the suit flew. I was crying because I knew he wasn’t gonna be there to say he was proud of me when I shut down S.I.’s weapons production. A great man died for me, and I do everything I can to honor his memory, to make that sacrifice worthwhile. But ultimately, my tears are for me alone, for the great gaping hole by my side that marks the place where he should be standing. And he carved that hole in a little less than three months. You had years with Phil.”

Widow bit the inside of her cheek, thinking that over. Her face untwisted, leaving vulnerability in its wake. When she spoke again her voice was very small.

“Does it ever get better?”

Tony had read her file, knew Widow was older than she looked. But she looked very young right now, and even reading between the lines that barely sketched her past, and even counting all that she said about ‘red in her ledger,’ Tony could not recall anyone in her file that she might ever have had to grieve for. It made him feel old, weighed down by his lifetime of accumulated losses: Howard, Maria, and Jarvis all in one fell swoop; Yinsen, the mentor unlooked-for; Obie, worst of them all, because his death tainted everything that had come before.

“There’s this thing I read once: ‘Time wears grief smooth like a river stone. The weight will always be there, but it’ll stop scraping you raw at the slightest touch.’ I’ve found it. . . pretty accurate.”

Widow pulled her knees up to her chest and tucked her chin behind them, eyes distant. Tony suppressed a yawn, blinking rapidly against the heaviness of his eyelids. Eventually, she turned to look at him head-on, her face blank but somehow gentler, more relaxed. All she said was “Thank you, Tony.” Then she slid smoothly to her feet and disappeared down the stairs.

When he had met her, over two years ago now, he had called her ‘Natalie’; after she stabbed him and then helped save his life he mostly called her ‘Widow’; over lunch the next day he called her ‘Natasha’ and she flashed him an absolutely brilliant smile.

**Author's Note:**

>  ~~This fic is a part of my[Just As They Wished It To Be](http://archiveofourown.org/series/36379) universe. I went back and forth on whether to mark it as a part of the series, as it will be important to later developments, but for now it felt out of place because all that I've written is bits and pieces of Tony & Rhodey's pre-canon relationship. So it may end up marked as part of the series later, but for now it stands entirely alone.~~ Adding this fic to my [Just As They Wished It To Be](http://archiveofourown.org/series/36379) series as of 9/1/13, because it will soon be relevant.
> 
> Also, as I noted in the tags, I know fanon better than (comic) canon; so for the purposes of this fic Natasha was taken by the Red Room when she was too young to remember her family, and she made no real emotional connections until Clint brought her to S.H.I.E.L.D. I know I'll probably have to rejigger her backstory when **Captain America: The Winter Soldier** comes out, but for now that's my take.
> 
> The title is taken from Catherynne M. Valente's novel _Deathless_ ; the line Tony quotes to Natasha is from Lois McMaster Bujold's _The Sharing Knife: Beguilement._

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Half Helter-Skelter and Half Twinkly](https://archiveofourown.org/works/888302) by [errantcomment](https://archiveofourown.org/users/errantcomment/pseuds/errantcomment), [LokiOfSassgaard](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LokiOfSassgaard/pseuds/LokiOfSassgaard)




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